The Concert (13 page)

He would rather not have thought about Albania on a day like this, but it came into his mind unbidden. He'd had such high hopes of Albania! But be patient, he told himself: all things come to him who waits…It was too soon to give up hope. He'd issued new instructions, and there was to be a complete overhaul of the official attitude towards Albania. Something must be done; the lynx would soon be tamed.

In Cambodia, on the other hand, things were going quite well - better even than he'd expected. And all over the world his followers were supporting him and had gone over to the attack. For the first time ever, the thrones of such supreme masters as Shakespeare and Beethoven were toppling. Someone had suggested that a Chinese pianist who had played a Beethoven sonata should have his arms cut off. That might sound barbaric, but it was not. Monsters like Shakespeare and Cervantes were more harmful than any emperor. They wielded absolute power; they were tyrants of the mind, colonizers of the brain. Kings could easily be overthrown, decapitated, or relegated to oblivion; but those other scourges managed to survive through the ages with their power unscathed and even enhanced. But now their supremacy was about to end. He, Mao Zedong, had come into the world to challenge them. Their time was up. Like the kings and the tsars, they would be given their marching orders: Chairman Cervantes, Prince Beethoven, Generalissimo Shakespeare, Count Tolstoi, and so on…Compared with him, Mao, what a poor figure other, minor world-changers cut: they had merely overthrown some monarch or prime minister, while he alone had stood up to the evil Titans and would deliver the whole human race from the unwholesome spell of art.

He'd had scores of thousands of individuals put on trial and punished, but he still wasn't satisfied. Some had been sent to the provinces, consigned to muddy ditches and rice-fields. They'd been beaten and spat upon. They'd been made to forget they'd once been writers, and then terrorized by being reminded of some novel they'd written, as if it had been a crime. As for those who couldn't forget, they'd been driven to suicide. And yet he felt he hadn't done enough.

Every so often he would rehearse in his mind, like a kind of play, a meeting which resembled sometimes a gathering of the Greek gods on Olympus and sometimes a session of his own Politbureau, For the next point on the agenda, I call first upon Prometheus…Then on Chen Pota.

In any case, Zeus had been wrong to chain Prometheus to a rock. That only made a martyr of him. Marx himself had said so, thus spreading confusion among the world proletariat.

If he had been Zeus, Mao wouldn't have put Prometheus in chains or hurled down thunderbolts upon him. He would have sent him to the rice-fields, amid the mire and the people.

The ancient Greeks knew plenty of things but they didn't know the power of the paddy-field. The paddy-field, with its mud and its night soil…Nothing like it for destroying a man and making him disappear without trace.

Mao had a file, perhaps the one he cherished most, labelled “Letters from the Rice-fields”. In the last few years he'd received letters of every kind from all sorts of people: from prisoners on the eve of execution, from widows, from fallen ministers begging him for clemency, from unemployed embalmers, and so on. But those from the rice-fields were the only ones he enjoyed looking through again from time to time. They were from writers deported for a period of re-education in the provinces or in out-of-the-way villages. “Thousands of us here in the water and the mud thank you, O God, for delivering us from the demon of writing …”

Mao liked to get out the file and compare recent letters with earlier ones. He noticed that they grew more and more scrappy, their sentences thinner and thinner, akin to the dullness of the earth. Lord, he thought one day, soon they'll only be seeding me senseless ramblings like the blatherings of someone with apoplexy. And after that I shouldn't be surprised if one of them just dispatches a piece of paper smeared with mud, a few scattered characters like grains of rice miraculously left behind after a flood.

He smiled at the thought of it. Then he
could
be said to have got the better of the writers! He'd always felt a deep aversion for them, but after he married Jiang Qing, and especially after she began to get old, his dislike had become almost unbearable. He knew, as the foreign press had recently reminded him, that she was influenced by her past as a third-rate film actress, and the jealousies, failures and permanent humiliations she'd undergone, though she probably hadn't told even him about the worst of them. He knew or could imagine the real reasons why this belated settling of old scores had become an obsession with her, but as it chimed with his own ideas he didn't disagree with it. One day he went so far as to tell her so.

“You're an out and out egoist, and it's a personal matter with you. I'm a poet myself, but I don't hate other poets out of jealousy or spite. It's because they do harm that I can't stand them, not out of any personal animosity. And when I've got rid of them all I'll even feel a certain regret, as one might after having to pull up a beautiful but noxious weed. You, on the other hand… But you're a woman, so I suppose one mustn't be too hard on you…”

He well recalled that unforgettable July night in Shaoshan when they'd sat up till dawn talking about the future of the world.

It was an oppressive, damp night, stifling the end of every sentence into groans. They'd both been excited at the thought of the world of the future, purified of art and literature. “How marvellous it will be to purge the world of such delusions and unhealthy emotions!” she had cried, though she cracked her knuckles with a certain amount of apprehension. She knew it was a difficult task, and kept asking him, as if for reassurance, about the chances of success. He duly reassured her, and she replied, almost as if she were actually drunk: “And music too — on another night such as this well rid the world of that too, so that the whole planet is as deaf as a post!” The theatre, the novel, poetry — they were all to be dealt with in the same fashion. The only subject left for the imagination to work on — she didn't say this explicitly, but he could guess what she meant — would be their own two lives. Or rather hers. And was it such a wild idea, after all? What other woman since Creation had had the leader of a billion men for a husband?

All these things could be brought about somehow or other. Autos-da-fé had been common throughout the history of mankind, and it was quite feasible to close theatres, smash pianos, drag thousands of writers through the mud, and even return the human brain to a less complex state and make the imagination wither away. These things were all interconnected: the elimination of one brought about the destruction of another, jest as the fall of one beam can lead to the collapse of a whole roof. But there was still one thing more difficult to dispose of than all the rest. Twice, almost trembling, she had asked him: “What about life itself? What are we going to do about what people call the good life, with its after-dinner conversations, and love …?” More out of fear than anything else she'd had to make two attempts at explaining what she meant by love. After much beating about the bush she'd finally brought it out: she was talking about love in the usual sense of the word - the relationship between men and women. Mao had listened to her in silence, then, with the same deliberation as before, he explained that all the aspects of life she had referred to, not excepting love itself, would eventually fade away. After-dinner conversations would disappear, if they hadn't died out already, for the simple reason that there wouldn't be any more dinners (you couldn't describe a mere bowl of rice as a dinner!). As for love, that was only a question of time…

Except that his ideas were untinged by any personal ambition, their views had recently tended to grow more and more alike. True, Mao had been very much in love with his first wife: when he dedicated one of his most moving poems to her, Jiang Qing had responded with hysterical tears. But in the course of the last few years his opinions about love, as about a number of other things, had changed.

Jiang Qing, glad to see love relegated at last to a place among the other undesirables, began to talk more passionately, more fanatically even, than before, for hours and hours which he would always remember as
her
night. She whispered in his ear that love was their personal enemy (she no longer bothered to call it the enemy of China or of the Revolution), as ruthless as the rest and in many ways more unrelenting than they because more insatiable. She maintained that this wretched relationship between the sexes used up a large part of the world's total resources of love, thus depriving him and her of their own due share: it hijacked the love that should rightly come to
them
, she went on tearfully. Again he interrupted her calmly. “Don't worry, Jiang Qing,” he said, “love will be abolished too.” And he explained that love wasn't as powerful as it might seem: it hadn't even existed until comparatively recently., In the ages of barbarism it took the form of mere sexuality, and even in classical times its affective content was limited. It was the European Renaissance that had fostered the disease and turned it into the most widespread epidemic in the world. Bet the winged monster would eventually die as rapidly as it had been bore, after having already said goodbye to the things that had nurtured it — the arts, literature and all the other nonsense. He described the various stages of the war to be waged against it: the first thing to do was reduce love to what it had been before the Renaissance. The second phase would deliver it a fatal blow by reducing it to sexual relations pure and simple. Thus the danger would be to ail intents and purposes eliminated. “But how long will it take, for God's sake? How long will it take to finish it off?” she asked impatiently, almost in anguish. He had given her some sort of limit, he couldn't recall exactly what, but he did remember her sighing because she didn't think they'd live to see it. Soon afterwards, when he first heard of lovers in Cambodia being summarily executed after being found talking about love instead of politics, he'd reminded her of her sceptical sigh that hot damp night.

They'd talked till dawn, that strange summer night, discussing subjects that had probably never been debated before since the world began. “Anything that might encourage love must be abolished,” she murmured. “Women's shoes, jewellery, dresses, hair-dressing…” “But we've done that already, practically!” he answered. “Such extravagances haven't existed in China for a long time.” “Not in China, perhaps,” she complained, “but we must look much further — the rest of the world is full of them!”

Then she suddenly stood up and went into another room, After a while she came back wearing a uniform that was half military and half more like that of a prison warder. For a moment he had to shut his eyes: he couldn't stand the sight of her got up like that, with that wretched cap covering her sparse hair, those trousers clinging to her body
-
it was horrible, as if there were nothing left of her, not even the bones. He was well aware why she adopted his ideas on the reform of mankind so eagerly, but seeing her like this he realized she would go on trying to translate that dream into reality until she died. “From now on,” she whispered, “I shall dress like this not only when I'm with you, nor even just at meetings of the Politbureau, but everywhere - in public, at the big parades in Tienanmen Square, and even at official receptions, under the very noses of the foreigners.” Her words convinced him that if her sacrifice was going to be complete, the reward she expected would be no less so. I must be careful, he thought: this woman is consumed with ambition. But she shall have her reward! He couldn't remember very clearly now what he'd actually said at the time, nor even what he'd thought. No doubt he'd made a few half-joking, half-serious remarks: “As you faded, so beauty too faded from the world;” “the world must mourn for your lost youth;” “it's not you, but the world, that has grown old” — that sort of thing. And: “I once heard of a book about a young man whose face remained unchanged, while the effects of time could be seen only in his portrait…Someone must pay for the passing of your youth, Jiang Qing. All the women in China aren't enough for you? I knew you'd say that! Very well, let all the women in the world pay, then!”

He reminded her that some women in Europe thought as she did.

She listened eagerly, feverishly. “Some women,” he said, “have lost no time in adopting my ideas, even in the heart of Europe, in Paris
—
people call them Maoists. Don't you think that's wonderful?”

“Of course,” she answered, “but there aren't very many of them — just a drop in the ocean. What a task it will be to change all the others! Perhaps it would be a good idea to start with the women in Albania? The alliance between our two countries would make things easier.”

“Yes, you're right,” he answered. “That's what we'll do. The Albanian women will be the first ones in Europe to be de-feminized. I'm told they managed to throw off the veil after being forced by Islam to wear it for five hundred years. But we are much stronger than Islam!”

As dawn approached, their conversation grew more and more incoherent: sometimes he would nod off, sometimes she sounded as if she were talking in a waking nightmare. She would get into a rage, then a moment later be overcome by an icy wave of doubt. “Unsex all white women, master!” she cried out once as in a dream. Thee became cast down again at the thought of how long it would take. She was afraid everything would peter out when he died. She feared he himself might not be determined enough. He reassured her as best he could. “Don't worry! Once we get the thing started there'll be no stopping it,” If it hadn't still been ie the future, he might have quoted the example of Cambodia: “Look at Cambodia - it started there with hatred of culture and ended up with hatred of everything else. Now they're even allergic to buildings in their cities!” As it was, he just had to listen to her breathless fretting: “What if this? Supposing that?”